Like every other fan, I tried my luck to get a chance for exclusive hands on Xiaomi’s first smartphone with fingerprint sensor. Unfortunately, the country I live in is world’s second largest populated country and out of which only 100 Mi Explorers were chosen. I wasn’t in the selected 100 list, no surprise here, but luckily one of my very good friend and my colleague from TechinfoBiT happened to be the lucky one. He received Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 gold variant along with Hugo Barra’s autograph. I wish him all the best for the missions that he’s gonna complete and a big thanks for providing the device to review.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 ditches the recycled paper box styling, instead comes in a pretty compact white box. Inside the box you will find the device itself (ofcourse!), followed by some paperwork in chinese and sim ejector. The charger is 2A which in turn suggests its capable of fast charging. Although, I did expect to see USB type C on this device considering it was launched merely 3 months after the launch of Redmi Note 2.

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Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 retains the looks from Redmi Note 2, but instead of matte plastic its covered with aluminum, making it a premium looking device. Although top and bottom ends are made out of plastic for better supporting antennas. With all this smooth metal, it does tends to get slippery sometimes. The phone is actually quite similar to Meizu smaprtphone (M1) series in terms of design language.

Initial impressions of Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 is really impressive. With all the metal body, beefy 4,000 mAh battery and a huge 5.7 inch screen, Redmi Note 3 does feel a little heavy. The phone does support fast charging and doesn’t exhibit extreme heating behavior while charging or running bench-marking apps. Although phone does get’s gets little warm but that’s very much acceptable. Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 captures some stunning images during daylight and pretty decent images during night time. Although the selfie camera isn’t super wide for the perfect Wefie but does an appreciable job with much detailed selfies.

Dual tone flash works well along with the super fast fingerprint sensor which is located below the camera. The sound quality is pretty good while listening to music, but was oddly sounding cheap while playing stock notification and touch sounds. This might be due to a bug in OS which is still in BETA. The phone runs on Android 5.1.1 with MIUI 7 on top and should receive Marshmallow update pretty soon.

Camera Samples

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Daylight

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Night Shot

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Random Shots with HDR and Filter

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Front Camera

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As you might have seen the box, the phone will be available in three color variants: Space Grey, Gold and Silver. The exact date for the launch of Redmi Note 3 in India is not specified yet neither the price, but as per the rumors, expect the price to be around Rs 15,000 ($220 approx.) and launch date to be in the month of March. Redmi Note 3 seems to be a perfect fit to fill the gap of aging Mi4 and Mi4i perfectly.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to check the unboxing and hands on video of the new Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, which will be uploaded very soon. I will be sharing Benchmark results, performance reports, Sound Quality, Screen on time, battery backup and much more in the upcoming video.

Once again thanks to Nishant for inviting me over to get my hands on with the device.

Neeraj is a Tech enthusiast. He loves Cars, Gizmos, Science, Nature, Technology,Music and Nature. Currently, he works as a Web Master and also holds a Bachelors in Information Science & Engineering from VTU university in Bangalore.

While multitasking I didn’t noticed any extreme heating or lags…While charging and running benchmarks I did felt the phone getting warmer, but not by much margin when compared to Mi4i in initial stages. Although I will spending some more time installing more and more apps and games then I will share you the information regarding heating. Also do keep in mind this MIUI 7 OS is in Beta version for this phone.

Gb6

Thank you so much. One last thing bro how is the sound from the speaker? Is it loud & clear?

You’r welcome bro 🙂 While playing songs watching YouTube videos the sound was pretty loud and clear, but when i played notification sounds it sounded weird like a cheap speaker. But this might due to the BETA OS. Feel free to share this post with your friends 🙂

Sandip Chakraborty

Please, if you can, post the full review, with charging time, gaming and battery performance!!!! Thanks for the initial impressions.. It was the 3gb ram variant, right??